Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Old Timers Only/Medicines-Concoctions your mom put on you

We could buy licorice in a stick. It as serrated like the big Tootsi Rolls were, and came in a cardboard box with no wrapper or cellophane. Used it for sore throat. It turned you mouth and tongue black.

As a kid, my grandma used to make me drink a cup of warm water when I got up in the morning. I asked her why and she said it "kept you regular". I had no idea, at the time, what she was talking about, but knew I did not want to be not regular.

Turns out there is something to what she believed.

She also believed a draft would make you seriously ill, like pneumonia or something. It was no joy-ride to go in the car with her, in the summer, before air conditioning as the windows were not to opened as that caused a draft.

My grandpa was an embalmer 20 years before the advent of antibiotics, and a bigger germ freak never existed. He knew the true potential of untreatable infection and never got over it.

Yep. When coal oil's all you got, you use it. In addition to a few drips on the sugar, I'd get a coal oil rag wrapped around my neck when I went to bed.

Fat meat on a boil to draw it out.

A green pecan cut in half and rubbed on a ringworm. In winter, you just suffered thru it.

A dip of Levi Garret on a red ant sting. [I still do that]

Bear grease rubbed on bumps, bruises, arthritic joints...

Fried onions wrapped in a dish towel around your neck for sore throat/congestion/cough.

bt

None that I was given. My maternal grandmother, Italian, drank a small glass of sweet vermouth and a raw egg nightly. This for 60+ years. She died at age 102.

If she had only started younger....

tea made from mint...bay leaf ...and marijuana granny came straight off the boat from Greece

petro-carbo salve, yukon jack on a cotton ball for tooth aches.

Merthiolate - I dreaded the burn, but thought the red stain was cool.
Castor oil - cured me of the mystery ailments that caused me to miss school too oft in 3rd grade.
Salt Water - to this day, my dad thinks it will cure anything.
Blue Star Ointment - tried it once to cure jock itch, but wished for death soon after.